"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Normally, travel broadens the mind but what about visiting a totalitarian state?

American tourists pass by the Ministry of the Interior in Cuba

Traveling to Cuba under the Castro regime should be a subject for
serious reflection and not to be taken lightly for a number of reasons
that are not immediately evident. First and foremost the tourism
industry in Cuba is run by the military and intelligence services.

These reflections would also be useful for visits to other totalitarian regimes because they use many of the same tactics. Visitors are often kept
in areas geared to tourists providing them a Potemkin village experience. However that does not mean that information on health and security will be accurate and it can still place tourists at risk.

Seeing the Real Cuba or the Potemkin Village?
Two important questions that arise are how useful are trips to places like Cuba in ascertaining the reality on the ground? What has happened
in the past when tourists visiting a totalitarian regime take the lead in public diplomacy? Visitors to totalitarian states become targets of both the state security
service and the propaganda ministries. These regimes will pull out all
the stops to show themselves in the best light possible and make sure
that high profile visitors have a great time but within a reality fabricated by
them. It has paid back with big dividends in the past with a partial list including: Lincoln Joseph Steffens, Charles Lindbergh, Jane Fonda, Linda Ronstadt, and Dennis Rodman that wittingly or unwittingly became agents of influence after visiting totalitarians.

"We allow Cubans to come in and say that they're refugees. Well, in Cuba
— I've been there, you know — people are fed, people are housed,
people are clothed. There isn't violence in the streets.

Ronstadt had spoken more extensively about her impressions of Cuba in a 2003 interview in City Pulse:

It’s an amazing country. I’ve been all over Latin America. And it’s the
only Latin American country I’ve been in that didn’t have armed troops
on the street, there weren’t homeless people everywhere, and kids had
school uniforms and had schoolbooks paid for and had their health paid
for. There’s things going on in Cuba that we don’t know about, and
that’s mainly because of the Miami Cubans, they just absolutely won’t –
they are absolutely closed-minded. They hate Fidel Castro, they won’t
even hear about some of the good things he’s done, and they don’t want
anyone else to know about it, either. It’s a total propaganda device and
they’ve blanketed this country with propaganda about Cuba, huge amounts
of which are untrue.

This is has been going on for a long time and the techniques of hospitalityare so refined that one need not be an ideological fellow traveler to be converted. These totalitarian tactics are ideologically neutral and the language used by those taken in by it remarkably similar.

"Hitler, I am beginning to feel, is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader -- and as such rather fanatical -- but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and, on the whole, has a rather broad view."

When Germans failed to achieve the Thousand Year Reich Hitler had wanted the German dictator issued the Nero Decree
on March 19, 1945 ordering the infrastructure of the country to be
destroyed effectively sentencing the German people to death by destroying water supplies and shelter. Not
only did Nazi Germany order the extermination of the Jewish people at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 but three years later Hitler wanted to do away with the German people when they did not achieve his goals.

Did the Lindbergh's travel provide them with an advantage over Winston Churchill, for example who did not visit Nazi Germany, on the real nature of the German government? Remember that the Lindbergh's were not Nazis but had been manipulated during their five visits to Germany but had as did many others the "advantage" of saying that they had special knowledge because of those visits. Churchill's counsel in the 1930s to take a hard line against Nazi Germany went unheeded and the consequences were catastrophic. In 1945 in a speech to the Belgian Senate and Chamber, Winston Churchill described how one day Franklin Roosevelt asked him what should we call this war? To which the British Prime Minister responded the Unnecessary War because it easily could have been prevented.Totalitarians whether Nazi or Communist have a track record of effectively using tourism, athletic events, and academic exchanges to present their regimes in a way that historically legitimized them and covered up their hostile objectives often with disastrous results not only for their own countries but the international community as a whole. An excellent accounting of these practices and their impacts on national and international politics is found in Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims that should be required reading for anyone traveling to Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela, or Vietnam.

The friendly sounding "Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)" claims to encourage visitors to see the real Cuba for themselves and works to educate visitors about the "real Cuba" while debunking criticisms of the 56 year old dictatorship. The reality is far more sinister. According to counter intelligence
expert Chris Simmons the "ICAP’s intelligence collaboration with the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) dates back over three decades. It is not a DI entity per se, but is believed to be roughly 90% DI-affiliated due to a large pool of collaborators who serve the small team of ICAP-embedded DI officers." A past president of the ICAP was indicted for drug smuggling into the United States in 1982. In 2014 the FBI published a report detailing how Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting
leftist American academics and university professors as spies and
influence agents. This is not new and has been going on for decades with some major successes by the Castro regime that compromised national security and cost lives.
At Florida International University psychology professor Carlos Alvarez who was the associate professor for educational leadership and policy studies,
and his wife Elsa Alvarez, counselor for the psychological services
department were arrested by the FBI on January 6, 2006. Professor Alvarez conducted trips to Cuba with young professionals in the late 1990s in what was billed a conflict resolution project. Alvarez was sentenced to five years in prison and his wife to three years in prison on February 28, 2007 for conspiring to act as unregistered Cuban agents.

Tourism funds Cuban military

A large chunk of the Cuban economy is run by the company Gaviota that deals with
tourism and is controlled by the MINFAR (the military) and Castro’s Ministry of the
Interior (MININT) that runs a hotel chain, an airline, taxi company,
marinas, shops, restaurants and museums and is under the control of
another general. The tourist group Cubanacán was founded at the
beginning of the 1980s and is also under military control. This means that tourist dollars go directly to strengthening the Castro regime's repressive apparatus.

"The Cuban government looks with suspicion on U.S. travelers entering on religious or humanitarian licenses, and U.S. "people to people" programs are handled exclusively by Celimar, a division of Havanatur that is said to report to MININT and is heavily laden with ex-MININT staffers."

The Government of Cuba does not recognize the U.S. nationality of
U.S. citizens who are Cuban-born or are the children of Cuban parents.
These individuals will be treated solely as Cuban citizens and may be
subject to a range of restrictions and obligations, including military service.

There is also an ethical question
providing hard currency to a system that is actively repressing its own
populace and no matter how little it may be, it is helping a
totalitarian state. If you are going to travel to Cuba and put hard currency into dying communist institutions that prolongs the life of the dictatorship then you have to ask yourself what would serve as a counterbalance to that? What does purposeful travel to Cuba look like? One could argue that it looks like this: members of the Miami-based non-governmental organization, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, traveled to Cuba in 2002 and took humanitarian assistance to Cuban dissidents and signed the Varela Project in the living room of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas.

Courageous human rights activists from Europe and Latin America have risked all to assist Cuban human rights defenders. Is this something that you'd be willing to do? Would you be ready to assume the consequences?

Keep the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 and the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980

The Miami Herald editorial board on April 16, 2016 called for ending both the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980 and the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. Taking this course of action would be shortsighted and have a devastating impact on South Florida. The Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980 is a law that does the following it is: "An act to provide general assistance to local educational agencies for the education of Cuban and Haitian refugee children, to provide special impact aid to such agencies for the education of Cuban and Haitian refugee children and Indochinese refugee children, and to provide assistance to State educational agencies for the education of Cuban and Haitian refugee adults."

The current law does not guarantee federal assistance but states: "Certain Cuban and Haitian nationals who are neither refugees nor asylees may be eligible for ORR - funded refugee assistance programs under Part 401 of Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 401)." This law is not targeted to asylum seekers or refugees as The Miami Herald editorial claims and eliminating it would be a disaster not only for Cubans and Haitians but also for South Florida.

Ending Refugee Education Assistance will shift costs to local taxpayers

Despite
the claim made by The Miami Herald and President Obama there is no
post-Cold War era with Cuba. The Carter administration in the 1970s and the Clinton administration in the 1990s sought to normalize relations with the Castro regime as Obama is doing now and the end result then as now were mass migration crisis with Mariel 1980 and the rafter crisis in 1994-1995 along with hostile actions by the Cuban dictatorship demonstrating that the Cold War was still underway.

What
has driven migration over the past half century has been the Cuban
nightmare created by the Castro brothers combined with a perception of
weakness of occupants in The White House. The crisis generated today in
Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Mexico is regime created with the aim
of achieving a long term objective: the end of the Cuban Adjustment
Act and the knowledge that the Obama administration will not retaliate. Every administration that engaged the Castro regime through unilateral concessions (LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and Obama) has seen migration waves used against it to shape policy. Administrations that took a harder line did not face these problems on their watch (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II).

History has demonstrated that it is not the Cuban Adjustment Act that generates mass migrations from Cuba, but rather administrations, perceived as weak by Castro, especially those that tried to normalize relations in 1977, 1993, and now 2013 that coincide with these crisis.

Contrary to the claims of The Miami Herald the Castro regime does not recognize the right of Cubans to enter and exit their own country. Tens of thousands of Cubans are not allowed to return to Cuba. The Cubans who are allowed to return must obtain a visa and pay exorbitant fees
at a minimum more than three times ($250) what a non-Cuban would pay
($75) and up to eight times more ($605). No other country in this
hemisphere has these restrictions. If the Cuban Adjustment Act is ended
then these Cubans will exist in a legal limbo as Cubans in the United
States did before 1966 or illegal and subject to deportation to a
country that violates international law shooting fleeing Cuban refugees
in the back.

Ending
the Cuban Adjustment Act and stopping the Refugee Education Assistance Act as
The Miami Herald is advocating will cause harm not only to newly
arrived Cubans and Haitians,
but will also negatively effect local schools, and the local economy
when the federal funds are cut. Immigration policy and the cost should
fall within the realm of national policy and not be passed on to
Miami-Dade County and Florida taxpayers straining local and state resources.

The
corruption condemned by The Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel and the ongoing immigration
crisis are not due to either the Cuban Adjustment Act or the Refugee
Education Assistance Act but the failures of the Obama administration
and its departments. Current law provides leeway to restrict those breaking the law or engaging in fraud that is all too often failing to take place.

Finally,
some advocates of engagement with the Castro regime look at the Cuban
Adjustment Act as an obstacle for normalizing relations with the
dictatorship. They are focused on getting rid of it addressing the emotional component while at the same time ignoring the human
cost of ending it not only in the concrete terms already mentioned above but also in human rights terms.

This mentality was perfectly represented in another controversy by Pedro Freyre, whose law
firm, Akerman, represents Carnival who was quoted in The New York Times
on April 22, 2016 concerning Carnival Cuba cruise controversy.“I had
been around my community long enough to know that emotions are
very deep here,” he said. “At the beginning, I said, ‘What? Why are
people so upset - 300,000 travel every year to Cuba.’ But this one
tugged at the heart strings.”

It is also important to remember that although Cuban-born people are now allowed on the boat they are still being discriminated against when compared to their non-Cuban counterparts. The Sun Sentinel Editorial board on April 20, 2016 outlined these discriminatory practices by the Castro regime with some key facts.

Americans visiting Cuba must present a valid passport and a special tourist card that costs $75.

Cuban-born Americans who immigrated after January 1971 must
purchase a Cuban passport — even though they have renounced their Cuban
citizenship and are now U.S. citizens. These passports are valid for six
years and cost $375. To keep these passports active, holders must pay
$230 every two years.

Cuban-born Americans who left Cuba before January 1971 may
use their U.S. passport, but must apply for an HE-11 visa, which costs
$250, lasts only 90 days and can take months to obtain.

Cuban-born Americans can now get on the boat but they are not treated as equals by the Castro regime because of where they were born. It matters not if they have a United States passport and the irony is that a regime founded on the claim that it is challenging U.S. imperialism treats those born in Cuba as second class when compared to their American born counterparts.

No longer separate but still unequal.

However this separate and unequal treatment of Cuban-born citizens of the United States by the Castro regime should give rise to a question: How are Cubans living in the island treated by the dictatorship?

The Seventh Communist Party Congress in Cuba was as eventful as the previous one. Big news item from the Associated Press: Fidel Castro who is about to turn 90 says that he may die soon. The AP's journalism is auto-censored in order for the dictatorship to maintain their news bureau on the island and like in North Korea crosses the line of journalistic ethics on occasion to stay there. Nevertheless, reporting that a 90 year old may die soon as news is a bit of a stretch.

However it did not end there.

Raul Castro, age 84, was "re-elected" with 100% of the vote by the communist party as the First Secretary along with fellow regime hardlinerJose Ramon Machado Ventura (age 85) as Second Secretary. The rest of the line up, unsurprisingly, was all too familiar.

What is newsworthy and what Capitol Hill Cubans has observed in this coverage is the difference in reaction by the press to attacks on the George W. Bush administration compared to the Barack H. Obama administration by the Castro regime.

If there is one lesson over the past 52 years it is that political
considerations have priority over economic considerations in order to
preserve the regime. When it is convenient to decentralize in order to
survive the regime will do that as it did in the early 1990s and as it
appears to be doing today. At the same time when things improve and
regime survival depends on the re-centralization of economic control at
the expense of economic growth as was the case in the late 1990s and
through the 2000s they will do that as well, but the important
consideration is that the Cuban people are tired of this regime and want
change.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

"Mr. Aylwin was one of the great Latin American statesmen of our time.
His struggle for democracy, social justice and human rights will remain
an inspiration for the region and the world." - Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations, April 16, 2016

I was honored to meet President Aylwin at his home on two occasions and engage him in conversation. First as a student in January of 2003 and the second time as a pro-democracy activist in 2010. It was a great honor to meet him and I mourn his passing and offer my prayers for him, his family and friends.

"[O]rdinary men and women may often feel unmotivated to exert their citizenship, either because they cannot tell the difference between the different alternatives, or because they have lost faith in the political classes, or because they feel that the really important issues are not in their power to decide."

"In Venezuela there is a tomb for prisoners, in Venezuela human rights are violated #AmnestyIsFreedom" - Lilian Tintori over twitter, April 18, 2016

Lilian Tintori, wife of Venezuelan prisoner of conscience and opposition Leopoldo Lopez alluded in her tweet to a powerful article that appeared the same day. Attorney and human rights defender Tamara Suju Roa began her essay "The Tomb and the isolation cell" on the unseen harm done to Venezuelan prisoners of conscience:

The invisible wounds that Lorent Saleh and Gabriel Valles present may be overcome, maybe not. Perhaps only time really know what physical and psychological damage that confinement in The Tomb is going to leave them for the rest of their lives. Fear, humiliation, guilt, profound sadness, nervous disorder, despair, boredom for their physical appearance, form part of the psychological symptoms that those long isolated in extreme locations without ventilation and natural light.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Enjoy some Cuban food and film at Florida International University on Monday, April 18th at 12:30pm. The film in Spanish with English subtitles is "La Muerte del Gato" (The Death of the Cat) and is a comedy about life in today's Cuba.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

"To us it is suspicious, that in the midst of this and after so many
years, we suddenly get this letter and we're concerned whether they're
doing this to try to prevent us from exercising free speech with the
flotillas in Cuba." - Ramon Saul Sanchez, reaction to NBC6 upon receiving letter denying his application for residency in the United States and asking him to leave the country.

Last night on Roberto R. Tejera's program Prohibido Callarse (Forbidden to be Silent) Ramon Saul Sanchez was interviewed along with his attorneys. A copy of the envelope in which the letter arrived was handwritten and his name misspelled was shown on air. In addition it was revealed by Roberto Tejera that the Miami office of Homeland Security just last week met with functionaries of the Castro regime's Ministry of the Interior in negotiations of which the content are unknown.

Screen grab from program Prohibido Callarse of envelope denying residency

I've known Ramon Saul Sanchez for over twenty years and consider him a friend. We take different positions in the US - Cuba policy debate, but we do agree on a fundamental level that change in Cuba can best be achieved through nonviolent means. This past week in the radio program Valores Humanos (Human Values) we discussed, in Spanish, the principles and applicability of nonviolence within the Cuba context.

Ramon Saul's reaction to President Obama's December 17, 2014 Cuban policy announcement was that it was an opportunity and that he would keep an open mind. My own view on that day was and remains that: "Regime hardliners have won, thanks to the Obama Administration's actions today. Kidnapping an American and holding him for ransom
for five years has paid off. Moderate elements within the
dictatorship, seeking to transition Cuba into a responsible member of
the family of nations, will have to continue to remain silent and wait."

Never thought that moderate elements in the diaspora would also be targeted under this new Cuba policy in an effort to silence them, leaving only administration apologists and corporate interests to repeat talking points.

In the mean time friends of freedom should be watching closely what happens later today in Marathon Key, Florida when the Democracy Movement attempts to exercise it's first amendment rights to free speech and assembly with their flotilla.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Carnival Cruise Line reached an agreement with the Castro regime on March 21, 2016 to sail to Cuba from the United States, but in order to conduct their core mission they had to agree to a policy of the Cuban dictatorship that bans all Cubans from traveling into the island by boat. This systematically discriminates against all Cubans born on the island whether or not they are citizens of another country. However some Cubans can fly into and out of Cuba on a plane. This updated version of separate but equal was approved by the Obama Treasury Department on July 7, 2015.

Police officers, in coordination with anti-drug authorities in Panama, seized 401 kilos of cocaine from Cuba, in an action carried out in the Caribbean city of Colón, 80 kilometers north of the capital, said an official source. The illicit substance that was found in a container in a port town, camouflaged between tanks of molasses, came from Cuba and was bound for Belgium, reported the National Police of Panama (PN). The drug was seized under the so-called operation "Caña Brava" by agents of the Colón area police zone of the Directorate of Police Intelligence.

Unfortunately, these decisions at one time could be decided locally, but in 2000 the Supreme Court in the Crosby versus National Foreign Trade Council decision stripped that power from states and localities and left it in the hands of the executive branch.

The meeting between two Miami Beach city officials and Cuban diplomat Gustavo Machin where the question of a Castro Consulate in their city was discussed underscored the pitfalls of engaging representatives of the Castro dictatorship. Gustavo Machin turned out to be a Cuban intelligence operative who had been posted to the Cuban Interests Section in Washington DC where in 2000 he led nine other diplomats in a physical assault of 20 peaceful protesters and a secret service agent also beaten up in the diplomatic mob action. Machin was expelled in 2002 in the aftermath of the Ana Belen Montes affair in which a high ranking pentagon official was discovered to be a long term Castro agent passing secrets to enemies of the United States. In 2012 this same Cuban diplomat was involved in the cover up of the murder of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in what was a State Security operation.

This meeting and commentary by Mayor Levine and Commissioner Arriola on their willingness for Miami Beach to welcome a Castro Consulate in their conversation with Gustavo Machin ended up creating a political firestorm in Miami Beach. This was in part because none of the other Miami Beach City Commissioners nor the Miami Beach Hispanic Affairs Committee had been consulted prior to the trip by the two politicians to Cuba last month.

Addressing the Miami Beach Hispanic Affairs Committee

This led to a five hour conversation at a gathering hosted by the Miami Beach Hispanic Affairs Committee on April 11, 2016 to a packed room of concerned citizens who in their vast majority opposed the opening of a Cuban consulate in Miami Beach. In a unanimous vote the Committee recommended that the Miami Beach City Commission explicitly not welcome a Cuba Consulate until human rights improve in the country.

The United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.
North Korea does have a permanent UN mission in New York City but no
embassy in Washington DC or consulates in the rest of the country.
This is a reasonable policy due to the Hermit Kingdom's outlaw
behavior. Considering Cuba's extensive history of sponsoring terrorism North Korea is an appropriate comparison for U.S. policy makers considering opening up consulates around the United States.

Why would the State Department want to open this Pandora's box of Cuba Consulates across the United States? This position needs to be explained to the American people

The first duty of government is to protect its citizens and to protest when other levels of government pursue policies that needlessly endanger the
lives and security of their community. This failure should be taken into consideration at election time.